The Overeating Phase of the Warrior Diet

Overeating on the Warrior Diet means just what you would expect. You eat more than you normally would, but only in the evening at your one meal. With overeating, you don’t count calories, feel guilty eating high fat (but healthy) foods, or portion foods to ensure that you receive the appropriate fat, carbohydrates, and protein.

Overeating simply means that you eat — starting with foods like a green salad and then moving to proteins, fruit and/or cooked veggies, denser carbohydrates, and/or healthy fats — until you feel full. You can usually tell that you’re reaching the point of being full and satisfied when you start to feel more thirsty than hungry.

This concept of overeating means that you eat in an instinctual manner. Do you think that the Paleolithic human wondered about how many grams of fat he or she was eating in a day? Or what the protein-to-carb ratio in a given meal was? No, the ancient human feasted at the end of the long day and enjoyed that feast sans guilt.

The Warrior Diet calls for a return to this healthier concept of overeating.

Overeating is okay on the Warrior Diet because you’re overeating on healthy foods, not the typical junk that packs on fat and promotes disease. But you may be thinking that a calorie is a calorie. Much of the other diet advice you’ve heard throughout your life, just like this adage, isn’t true.

When you overeat after fasting, your body is primed to use the calories and nutrients that you consume in a much more effective manner. Fat cells are released into the bloodstream and used up, nutrients assimilate into the body at a faster rate, greater amounts of lean muscle mass are built, secretions of your growth and other hormones increase (including dopamine, that “happy feeling” hormone), and body tissue is repaired.

A 2003 study on mice showed that those mice that were put on a fasting regimen combined with overeating, such as the regimen promoted in the Warrior Diet, saw a phenomenal increase in their overall health. Aging seemed to have been reversed. Diabetes disappeared. Cells repaired. And life span increased.

You may think of overeating as binging, gorging, and in general being a pig. Because of the various — and oftentimes, false — advice you may have heard over the years from well-meaning friends and family and by mainstream diet and exercise magazines, books, and blogs, you may believe that overeating will ultimately make you fail at reaching your fitness goals.

Overeating on the Warrior Diet isn’t about pigging out on ice cream, chicken fingers, pizza, burgers, and beer. Rather you simply eat healthful foods until you’re full and satisfied. You eat enough to refuel the tank, so to speak, and don’t feel guilty about it later.

So don’t get caught up in the term “overeating.” And don’t feel guilty about it. Just remember that it isn’t a free-for-all. You can overeat in a perfectly healthy way. You just want to make healthful food choices.